"it was the daytime...of the night"

I got the invitation letter from China this Monday, and there was much rejoicing! :)  I was happy to finally have the thing not just because it's my "ticket in," but because now I won't have to keep explaining to people why I'm not in China yet.  I have come up with the most concise explanations now, mainly because I'm kind of tired of hearing myself say the same complicated thing over and over again.  So now, I have a plane ticket for China and a visa in the process of being...processed.  On a sidenote, I can't say the word "processed" without thinking of Spam, or that Flight of the Conchords song, Jenny.

I was driving home tonight, enjoying the clean summer night air, albeit humid.  It is one of those nights that would be perfect for lying out on the asphalt driveway to look at stars.  It made me wonder if I can do that sort of thing in China.  They would probably have a field day, seeing a crazy white foreigner lying in the road, trying to see stars through the glare of city lights and profusion of smog lining the night sky.  I'll get my fill of that here in Virginia, and then I'll resign myself to staying out of the road when I get to China.

Oh, and when I am actually in China, since Blogger is blocked :(, I will be using this blog address:
http://cathayadventures.wordpress.com/

invitation letter and other things

Just as I brought this window up to write a post, I managed to spill an entire cup of coffee across my desk, narrowly missing my computer and passport.  I nearly had a heart attack.  The passport is now on top of my bookcase, where hopefully even I won't have the clumsy skills necessary to spill coffee.

I got a call from China last night, telling me that they had finally gotten the invitation letter.  Apparently the official in charge of signing and sending my letter had been out of town until now, so that explains the delay.  I should get it this Friday at the earliest, and then I will buy a plane ticket for September 9th, if all goes as planned!  I'm just happy to know that the wheels are now in motion.

I would also like to harass the person who decided that the United States would be totally run on 110V while the entire rest of the world runs on 220V.  Rude.  So, I bought a converter/adapter today that I'll use to keep my electronics from going up in flames and smoke.

Mom and I went to Goodwill today, and I found a great hardback copy of Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, plus the June 1985 copy of National Geographic with the Afghan girl cover. I am really fascinated by that picture--her eyes are beautiful and intensely haunting.  I'm interested to read the article that goes with it.  Apparently, the photographer went back pretty recently to find the girl, and she had aged a lot since he took the photo.  She's had an unimaginably hard life, I'm sure.    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Girl
Oh, and Gilead is a great read.  We read it this past semester in American Lit, one of the last books on the syllabus, and it was one of the most enjoyable books we read.  It's in a journal/letter format--a minister, who is close to death, writes letters as journal entries to his young son to read.  It is not a hugely exciting or plot-driven book, but there were many sections in it that just hit you with the beauty of language and life.

great quote

The primary reason to study Blake and Dickinson and Freud and Dickens is not to become more cultivated, or more articulate, or to be someone who at a cocktail party is never embarrassed (but can embarrass others). The ultimate reason to read them is to see if they may know you better than you know yourself. 
- Mark Edmundson 

imagine

This little treat is from the time that Rachel, LiLi, Bethany, and I went to Central Park and walked by the John Lennon memorial.  Rachel really wanted to walk on it, across the rose-strewn peace sign, but Bethany didn't think it was a good idea.  I think if she had walked on it, the people sitting around strumming guitars and singing "Imagine" would have jumped up, forgotten about world peace, and killed her with their guitars.  Just a guess.

I need a visa

Lately I've have been checking my email in hopes of seeing one about my work visa invitation letter.  I finally got one last night.  And now, it's looking like I might not get the invitation letter that I need to apply for my visa for another two weeks.  So the visa probably won't arrive until the day of or a couple days before I leave.  Yikes. I'm hoping to fly out August 26th, so that I can get over at least some jet lag before teaching starts on September 1st, but that might not happen.  Well, either way, I am getting more and more excited!  Now to figure out how to stuff 10 months worth of my life into a couple suitcases...

a crash in the night

Our house had no air conditioning, so the heat hit me like a fury whenever I left the frigid St. John's University after a day of class to come home. Some nights were awful--I pulled up a small fan next to my bed and set it on a chair to cool me off point blank, but that didn't always make sleeping easy.

One particular night, I was dozing off and on until something like 3 am, when I thought to myself, this is the last straw, and pulled the fan up even closer. I woke an hour later (or maybe I never fell asleep again) by a tremendous crash. I sat up, bleary eyed and feverishly hot, wondering if the crash came from outside or inside. Then, as I sat debating what to do, I heard whispering and giggling from the hallway. I cracked my door and peeked out, and saw that Naomi's door was open, and so was Lisa's. I stumbled down the hallway as I put my glasses on, and saw that Naomi was in Lisa's room, peering out the window into the front yard and...giggling.

I stepped inside the room and they both started and shrieked a little, and then they started telling me what was going on. Our neighbor next door, who is renting a room in the large house there, decided to install a contraband AC window unit in his room. Who could blame him? However, his landlady does not allow them because they drain so much electricity, so this guy thought he'd be smart and install his unit at 4 am. So he put it in his window, and it promptly fell out...and smashed in our tiny flower garden three stories below, between the two houses. Yeah. Naomi was basically falling over herself, just laughing and laughing as quietly as she could, because the man could probably hear us since we had all the windows open. It was such a pathetic sight, that AC unit all smashed up. I can only imagine that the man was wringing his hands or shaking his fist at the sky.

Then, the doorbell rang. And rang again. But we stayed upstairs, giggling and still feverishly hot, because we weren't about to go down there and answer the door at 4 am. The poor man probably thought we would call the cops on him if he didn't alert us first, but he eventually gave up. And left the broken thing in our flowerbed so that he wouldn't have to deal with it.

We all went back to bed, and I think I slept after that. All I know is I needed loads of coffee the next morning.

an unwelcome visitor

A week and a half after I moved in to Naomi's house in the Bronx, the Roberts' cousin Emily moved in. Emily and I became fast friends, but before this, there was an intruder in the house that threatened her when I was away at school. Emily was setting up her newly moved-into room, and began to hear something making its way up the stairs. A fuzzy black head and beady eyes protruded over the top stair as Emily watched, I can only picture her in horror, from her room. The black squirrel dashed into Rachel's room (next to Emily's) and hid itself, and Emily screamed out the window for Jesse (her cousin, whose backyard is shared with Naomi's house) to come help her.

So Jesse, whose pride and joy is a well-muscled Rottweiler named Scrapper, came inside to help--all Jesse had to do was yell "Scrapper! SQUIRREL!" and Scrapper betook herself up three flights of stairs and into Rachel's room to hunt around. There was no squirrel to be seen. Emily and Jesse began to talk in the hallway, and all of a sudden, the squirrel raced out between their legs, bounced off the closed door at the end of the hallway, and ran back into Rachel's room...where it was met with Scrapper. The squirrel made one last desperate leap to the windowsill, but Scrapper met it mid-air with her jaws, and shook it, and killed it. Poor squirrel. From what I heard and what I saw as documented in pictures, Jesse was beaming as if his daughter had won an Olympic medal.

So, the squirrel was disposed of, and Rachel moved in the next day--to the room where it met its end. The squirrel smelled awful, I'm told, so when Rachel moved in, I watched her closely. She said to me at one point, "does it smell funny in here?" I told her to ask Jesse why.

I have been home now for a week after a month living in the Bronx, and honestly, I miss being there! I got used to Spanish music blasting at all hours of the day and night, cars honking just for kicks, riding the subway every day for class, and walking with my eyes straight ahead instead of saying hello to anyone. Definitely a switch from the casual grocery store conversations you often have in the South. But besides all those negatives ( I guess you could say, unless you're really into Spanish music at 2 am) I listed, there were so many other things I loved about living there that those were canceled out.

The house I lived in was fantastic--a lady from the Roberts' church, Naomi, rents out rooms to women, and I was one of five renting from her. I had a great time getting to know them, and I was surprised at how fast I felt at home there with them. We hung out in the backyard a lot with the Roberts family, playing knockout and Dutch Blitz. I beat some people soundly at knockout, but sadly, I didn't win a single game of Dutch Blitz. They beat me every time. But, it just gave me a great incentive to get better at it, because I'm part Dutch anyway--I should be decent at it, or so I'm told. :)

I went to Chinatown three times while I was there, which is kind of funny to think about in retrospect. I wanted to go there, but I didn't know I'd go back two times after the fact. My friend LiLi Roberts, who is Chinese herself, introduced me to the world of haggling. I am not a natural-born haggler. I smile too much. I look like someone who would just give in, because lowering the price 2 dollars doesn't make that much of a difference. Oh, but I have changed my ways, and I am now on the road to being a better haggler than before. However, I think I might still need a friend with me to make it look more convincing. Here is our haggling routine:

Me: "How much?"

Chinese man: "15 dollars. Very quality. Very nice."

Me: "That's too expensive. 12 dollars?"

Chinese man: *wrings hands* "You make me go out of business! 14 dollars."

Lili: "C'mon, Laura. We can get it cheaper at another store."

Chinese man: "14 dollars, best price!"

Chinese woman:" Don't listen to her. She is ugly. Best price!"

Me: "12 dollars."

Chinese man: "13."

*LiLi and I start to walk away*

Chinese man: "WAIT! Okay, 12 dollars."

On a side note, the man's counterpart at the store (possibly the owner) was very rude, but that was a pretty hilarious moment. Don't listen to her, she's ugly. Goodness.

I have to stop writing for now, but next time, I will write the squirrel story and the AC unit story.

Dad and I are going up to NYC tomorrow morning on the Amtrak, and I can hardly believe I'm finally going! I had to laugh, talking with my friend (who lives in the house right behind the house where I'll be living in the Bronx) about it. He said, "oh, you're bringing your dad with you? he might want to take you right home when he sees our neighborhood!" Yikes. But owing either to being naive or just brave, I'm not that worried about the neighborhood. I'll have friends nearby who grew up there, some friends who will be new there as well (including Rachel and Noah, yay!), and I'm more than excited about the classes I'll be taking, enough not to worry too much about the rest.

thoughts about words

Everywhere I look lately, words come into my mind. Hemingway, Faulkner, and Percy keep on coming back to me, because they wrestled so much with words and meaning too.

When I am at work babysitting, and using as much creativity as I can muster to interest the twins (five years old and struggling to use any words at all) in an activity that most children would take to naturally, I think about all of the words that the children can’t say. There is such a huge gap of understanding between us without words. And every word that does come from between their garbled sounds is exciting. At their speech therapy, the therapists show the kids pictures of ordinary items, and sometimes the children are able to retrieve the right words from their minds to label the pictures, but other times they just stare and no meaning connects from the pictures to their brains. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be five years old and unable to communicate what is going on inside my mind. Whenever the girl starts screaming, I have to remind her “tell me! Tell me!” because otherwise she forgets to use words when she wants something.

Our language is so wonderful and full of words of such abstract and ambiguous meanings, which we can associate with both concrete and abstract subjects, but communication is such a broken, fragmented thing. People shout at each other when meaning doesn’t get across, or even to get their meaning across, and even then we all build walls so that words won’t penetrate. We pretend not to understand what is said, or simply ignore what is said unless we can find something in it to use. We treat words like dirt: both our own and those of others. Promises are meaningless, truth is whatever suits at the time, and memory is not reliable to speak about the past. In literature classes, we talk about degrees of reliability in narrators. It seems like we are all unreliable narrators, whether we’re talking with each other about ourselves or talking about other people. We bend words to suit our purposes.

I wonder what freedom, both from language and within language, would look like. What I mean is, freedom from language in the sense that language does not limit the meaning that we seek to describe or know; and freedom within language in the sense that words give us the means with which to wholly and satisfactorily express ourselves. I believe that Christ did not come only to redeem people, but he also is redeeming the rest of the created order like it says in Romans. The whole creation groans as it waits to be freed, and languages groan under the weight of sin as well. But the Word will redeem words.

What does it mean that Christ is the Word? I would love to hear sermons on that subject. From what I can think of right now, it seems that he is the only trustworthy and pure Word, so he is the truth made Incarnate. He not only speaks the truth, but he is truth. It's hard for me to wrap my mind around that. But I do know that God cares about words, because he chose to speak to us through the written language of the Bible and through the Word, Christ. Since God cares so much about words, and as they are a part of his creation, it seems as though the words themselves have fallen with us, twisted and in need of redemption. I feel all the time that the words I use in conversation or in writing are never adequate or careful or thoughtful enough. I'm looking forward to seeing what it is like to have every part of me made new, including my language.

the post-grad life, take one

I drove to the library today after work to get a new library card. It's been so long since I checked a book out of a non-school library, and when I walked in, it was a beautiful feeling. I actually miss GCC's library, because having so many books at my disposal 2 minutes walking distance away was pretty wonderful. Over the last week, I kept on thinking of books on my Amazon wishlist that I have time now to read, and then remembering that I need to go to the library since I can't fork over all the cash I need to buy books right now. When I move out and get another job a year from now, I feel bad for whoever has to help me move, because I have accumulated so many books. Moving people with books is the worst.

No, moving people with pianos is the worst.

The Brothers Karamazov is on my desk now, waiting to be read. I'm pretty excited about this one, because so many people have told me to read it and I wanted to before I read Notes from Underground.

Most nights this week I've been reading Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but I must still be sleep-deprived because I give up and go to sleep after 10 minutes, so it's either boring or I just need more sleep. Yeah, it's not boring. I just checked.

I've also been applying for my work visa this week, which seems really complicated, but it should end up fine. I just hate paperwork. My employer sent me the contract to sign, but as my parents pointed out to me, it would be dumb to sign it yet because the part that details my salary and the dates I will be there wasn't filled out yet. So I'm waiting for them to send me a legit contract, and then I will sign my life over to the PRC.

The Bronx, and beyond

While I'm in a blogging mood, maybe I should share more about what I'm doing this summer, besides reading and babysitting. Halfway through June, I'm moving up to the Bronx for a month to live. I'll be taking a course at a university in Manhattan that will certify me to teach English as a second language to adults. I'm so excited about it, but I'm starting to get a little nervous about it too. Mostly because I've never been to NYC, much less lived in a city before. I'm used to the South and smallish towns, so I am probably going to stick out like a sore thumb. Overall though, even if I'm nervous about it once in awhile, I think it will be a good time, and I'm really looking forward to meeting the ladies that I will be living with. I never expected this summer to look so exciting to me...I think that I use that word (exciting) all the time, which is probably driving everyone nuts, but I haven't been this excited in awhile. It's going to be a great summer.

I'm envisioning days spent babysitting, and then coming home and reading or working in the garden, or riding my bike. Just familiar, relaxing things. I'll do that for two months. And then the month inbetween will be kind of the opposite, fast-paced and new. And then at the end of summer, I'm hoping to go with my current roommate Heidi to a good friend's wedding, and then a few days after that I'll take the longest flight of my life to China. So it looks like I only have two solid months of familiarity and home left before I expatriate myself and see what that's like.

I wonder what home will be after that.

China blog?

I need to decide whether I should use this blog in China, use a different one, or not use one at all. So, here are my reasons for each choice.

I could use this blog in China, because that would be super easy and some people already know about this one. It could just morph into a adventures in China blog. The downside is, I'm not sure how much about Christianity I would be able to post at all. Which is okay, but that might mean I'd have to delete or censor stuff I've already written.

Second option, I could use a different blog because then I could make that solely my China censored blog, starting from scratch. It might be more fun too, because it would have more purpose than this one.

Or I could just not blog at all, because it might be more meaningful to tell about different experiences and stories through personal emails and letters.

Well, those are my three choices. I'll think about it more after I graduate in a week (!!).

confirmed

I am officially moving to China for 10 months to teach English, starting September 1st. Wow.

This summer will go by so fast...one month home to work, one month in NYC for the ESL certification course, one more month at home to work, and then China. I am so excited.

China!

Last week, I was offered a job...in CHINA! My Chinese teacher asked me if I would like her to give my name to her friend in China, who is the director of a pretty large language school near Beijing, so I agreed and within a couple days this director had asked for my resume and offered me a job. I can hardly believe it happened that quickly. I am so used to applying for half a dozen summer jobs in the US, hearing back from none of them, and not getting definite answers even after calling in to inquire. It feels so strange that this is happening so fast, but I am excited about the possibility! I haven't accepted the job yet, but I am talking to my family about it and asking as many questions about it as I can think of. Two girls who live on my hall are going to teach in China with New Day, so they would be pretty near by. Who would have thought I'd have to move to China to hang out with college friends?

So, I am excited about graduating now for several reasons:

1. Being finished with final exams. Forever.

2. Living in New York this summer to get the ESL Certificate.

3. Going to China to teach English to 6-12 year-olds.

I can hardly believe how fast this is all happening. Hopefully by the end of this week, I will know for sure whether I will accept the job, and then start planning from there. I think it would be a really wonderful experience, and I am excited that I would be able to keep learning Chinese after college--the school provides three hours of Mandarin lessons per week for the foreign teachers there. I would be living in an apartment building with teachers from the UK, Australia, Ukraine, USA, and Japan. I have no idea what that would be like, but I am kind of beside myself with excitement thinking about it.

Usually I would be worried and frantically trying to plan how things will work out, but I'm not anxious about it at all. If God is taking me there, He's going to take me there, and I am just going to go one day at a time and trust that He knows what He's doing. It's nice not being in control, when I actually realize that I'm not.

Here is a little Chinglish, just for fun:

the heron

The water sifts through it,

That wild beak laid open

For fish in the hollows;

One of them rests in dark water

Beneath his feet.

I wake in my unease and

Envy his patience, his

Absence of forethought at night,

The time where I lie awake,

The least of my thoughts great in my mind.

I lie down again, and

He makes no sound;

The fish go calmly by.

saundy

Last night, I drove down to the Pittsburgh airport to pick up my really good friend Saundy, who's been in Costa Rica teaching for the past two months. She's there on a tourist visa, so she has to come back every 90 days...which makes me happy, because next time she comes back, I'll have graduated and left. :( Her mom, Louise, rode with me, and we passed the hour and a half talking and trying to see through the snowy windshield. Yes. It snowed again...just as I was getting fully convinced that spring was here.

It was a good adventure though, and I had fun talking with Louise on the way down and then to Saundy on the way back up. Her flight came in after 12 am, and I didn't really feel like driving around for half an hour waiting for her to come outside, so I sat by the terminal in my car waiting. There were no parking signs everywhere, so I tried to look inconspicuous...however you do that. But, it didn't really work, because an airport cop came up to me and told me to shove along, and then looked suspiciously at my Virginia license plates. So I shoved along so that I could loop back around, and of course that's when Saundy called me. The poor girl was wearing capris, sandals, and a short sleeve shirt, because it was 95 degrees when she left Costa Rica this morning!

I am so glad that I got to see her, because I'm going home on Easter break tomorrow morning. Saundy's spending the night in my room, because my dear roommate (who I already miss) is in Florida for softball spring training. This roommate also forgot to sign the checklist on our door that verifies we do not have illegal things in our room, because they will check and fine us for them over Easter break, if we happen to have any. So, I will have to figure out how to forge her signature. Shh.

summer reading

Yup, I'm posting a summer reading list already. Except it's not so much a summer reading list as a post-graduation thing, with all the time that I'm going to have from neither being in school nor being gainfully employed. Just kidding. :)

I'm going to a school in Manhattan for a month (more about that later), but besides that, this summer looks like a good time for lots of reading. And working, because I really do want to find a job and move out on my own.

Here is my list--some are repeats, but most aren't:

The Brothers Karamazov

Notes from the Underground, both by Dostoevsky

A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken

Surprised By Joy by C.S. Lewis

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Signposts in a Strange Land: Essays by Walker Percy

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

Confessions by St. Augustine

some party this is, juno

On Tuesday afternoons, I usually put in a good 2 hours grading very short response papers or quizzes for my advisor, who I TA for. The classes I usually grade things for are the Lit classes that everyone is required to take, so the answers I get to some of these quizzes are pretty hilarious sometimes. You can tell when someone has Spark-noted or just plain not read something. Which, face it, everyone is guilty of sometimes. But really, when you start getting answers like "Shakespeare wrote around 500 BC" you start to wonder. Some people just draw little pictures instead of answers--one guy responded to a question about Don Quixote saying "I don't know...but here's a spider," and there it was.

I had a moment today, when I was reading through the 50th response paper about whether Dido should or shouldn't have been put into a different circle in Dante's hell for being suicidal, when a certain phrase jumped out at me. It was describing Dido and Aeneas' moment in the cave, ahem. It was this: "the gods threw together a quick celebration when they were in the cave together during the storm." I don't know if this is actually funny, or if it was just the way the wording drew pictures in my mind, but I thought it was hysterical.

I started picturing a bunch of gods saying to each other "oh, SHOOT Juno! You forgot to get the party hats! Where are the balloons? What about ice-cream cake? We are really going to have to throw this party together in a hurry...quick, reserve a cave." "Whatever Venus, you're just angry that you forgot the candles." Yeah.

perfectionism

I often see specially made fraternity shirts around campus with this written on the back, and it always makes me giggle: "Grove City College...where your best hasn't been good enough since 1876." Just a little pretext for my perfectionism rant.

I wonder sometimes how normal it is to be highly embarrassed about a short story or paper or essay you've written, or at least embarrassed about sending it in to be read by someone. No matter how many times you've edited, changed, or reworked whatever it is. I am cringing within myself thinking of The Quad editors reading the short story that I wrote last semester for Creative Writing. I like the story. I mean, I like it pretty well. I didn't want to send anything else in to see if it would get accepted, just this. But man, I already feel silly for having to send in a second copy because last night I remembered that I changed a name within the story but didn't remember to change it everywhere in the story. What's hilarious is that the senior and junior editors are two really good friends of mine, so I shouldn't be that embarrassed, but I'm still recoiling within myself at my typos. Oh well. I would like to experience some sort of satisfaction after writing something, and I do once I've spent a lot of time on something that I care about, but reading it two months later usually makes me cringe again, just a little. I guess all I can do is keep on trying, and realize that editing is 75% of good writing, or some other large percentage. That's what I've been told, anyway.

Starting next week, I'm going to be copy-editing for The Collegian and the first edition of the Law Society's Law Journal, which should be pretty interesting. I've been copy-editing for The Quad since last semester, and I have really enjoyed that. Editing things for typographical errors is exhilarating for me, which is probably weird. But the thing about it that helps keep it interesting is that most of the material I read is enjoyable...which might not be the case so much for the Law Journal. I have an article to edit for that this week and I have no idea what to expect. Maybe it will be great, who knows. I'm glad though that I'm getting a pretty good range of material to edit...law articles, newspaper articles, and literary essays, stories, and poems. I hope that it will help me out when I try to find a job this summer. I've been looking at all the entry-level publishing jobs I can find.

Okay, so in line with this whole perfectionism topic, I just had to let you know that I re-edited this post twice, just now. I crack myself up. Oh dear.

entertain...er...depress me?

I enjoy depressing movies. Maybe that goes along with my love for depressing 20th century American fiction, which is why I'm taking a class for it.

I finished Absalom, Absalom! today and it was sufficiently depressing, but it also made my head hurt because it was mostly stream-of-consciousness. I can do stream-of-consciousness, but reading 80 pages of it in one sitting is kind of overwhelming. Oops, sorry for the digression.

Anyway, my roommate and I both enjoy heavy movies more than light, happy movies, unless it's a Jeeves and Wooster or Black Adder episode. Looking at our desks, you can see plainly that we own more depressing movies than we own chick flicks. Shawshank Redemption, Hotel Rwanda, The Patriot, Jakob the Liar, Road to Perdition, and so on. We just go for heavier subject material when we pick out a movie. I think I enjoy being compelled to care about the characters when it's a heavier read. I enjoy a good satire or comedy, but I think what is most meaningful to me in books or movies is being made to care about characters that are twisted or are in the middle of twisted situations. The least depressing book we read this semester was my least favorite, because when I read it I wasn't thinking too much about the characters or why they meant anything to me, because they really didn't.

Now that I've made huge blanket statements, it's time for me to get under some blankets and sleep. Oh, one more thought--depressing movies have the best soundtracks. It's true. Thomas Newman is wonderful.

absalom, absalom!....olympics

I take a break from my intense (and confusing) reading of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! to mention the Olympics. I love them. My family has never been into watching sports, though throughout my childhood I took swimming lessons, and played some basketball and soccer here and there. We have never had a favorite sports team, or worn sports paraphernalia on purpose. But we eat up the Olympics. Ever since I was pretty small, I can remember all of us cheering and getting excited over speed skating, gymnastics, swimming, figure skating, skiing, you name it. Once we got a little older we would stay up with mom and watch until we could hardly keep our eyes open.

Tonight, Heidi (my roommate) and I searched high and low for a TV to watch the Olympics. We tried the one in our dorm's basement. No dice. Some very awkward couples watched a movie as we waited, doing our homework at a study table, and then the couples decided to watch another movie. Rude. We trekked through the snow to another building, but there was no room for us around that TV. So, we tried the Student Union, and found an Olympics-friendly TV in the commuter lounge.

I am reading the Faulkner novel while watching figure skating, which might not be a good idea, considering Faulkner has sentences that last for half a page sometimes, and it's easy to get lost. I like Faulkner, but I'm looking forward to class tomorrow, where Dr. Messer will tell us what in the world Faulkner is trying to communicate. It's beyond me.

henry buhl library

Well, I'm a doofus.

I studied in the stacks today at the library (on a Saturday, I know). I left my things in there to go to dinner, which is a very safe thing to do at Grove City College, especially since we are all issued the same computer when we come in, and everyone hates them, because they're always crashing. No one would want to steal one of those.

So I went off to dinner, and came back to the library around 6:30. I scanned my student I.D. It did the weird beep that means your card has been rejected. I tried again. No dice. I walked around to the front of the library, and that's when I noticed that all of the lights inside were dimmed. Yes. I was locked out of the library, and my homework and computer were locked inside. I felt just brilliant.

The good news is I really don't have that much homework to do this weekend, and I can get my stuff tomorrow when the library opens at 2. If I had been working on a paper this weekend, I might have just spiraled out of control and broken into Henry Buhl Library, which probably wouldn't look that strange here. You know that you're a Grover when you stare up in despair at the library on a Saturday night and wish you could get in.

(this, plus one foot of snow)

mind the gap.

I'm attempting to change the nature of this blog to something more than short blurbs about books. It's going to be an odds and ends of things, that will hopefully be more updated once I graduate and stop doing homework. That's not a good excuse, I know! It's pretty terrible. So, I'll start out by posting some pictures from the January Intersession trip that 10 of us from Grove City took a few weeks ago.

This was a class called "Modern Christian Writers," where we studied works by Chesterton, Lewis, Sayers, Eliot, and Charles Williams. It was the most enjoyable class I've ever taken, both because of the actual subject material and because we got to visit England! Most of us had never been there before (except for our seasoned, quintessential English professor), so it was wonderful for us all. I read some old favorites and made some new ones as well--the Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot, which seem m0re beautiful each time I read them; "The Weight of Glory" and "Learning in Wartime" by C.S. Lewis, and some of his poetry which I had never come across before; and Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers. Those were my favorite out of the works we read.

Canterbury

in Oxford...I forget the name of this building!

Les Miserables in London!

the group, haha...first day in Oxford

Magdalen College, Oxford